An interview with Ronald Hutton
This interview with Ronald Hutton (RH) was carried out by Wall to Wall Television (WW) for the Channel 4 programme Gunpowder, Treason and Plot. Ronald Hutton is professor of history at the University of Bristol.
Contents
• The significance of the Gunpowder Plot
• Elizabethan Catholics
• James VI and I
• James and the Catholics
• James's honeymoon and after
• Cracking down on the Catholics
• The Gunpowder plotters
• The plot and the age
• The flaws in the plot
• The conspirators in London
• The plot is delayed
• Catholic attitudes towards the plot
• The Monteagle letter
• Robert Cecil
• James and the letter
• Tresham is accused
• The discovery of the plot
• The flight of the conspirators
• The plotters' last stand
• The government spin
• James and Fawkes
• If the plot had succeeded
• The impact of the conspiracy
The
significance of the Gunpowder Plot
WW: Why do we remember the Gunpowder Plot?
RH: We remember it because it was the most fantastic political episode in our history – the first attempt to destroy an entire political nation in one blast and, so far, the last.
WW: Tell me about the significance of the technology behind it.
RH: One of the most amazing things about the Gunpowder Plot is it's the most ambitious attempt to apply the new gunpowder technology to political terrorism. It's going to take out Westminster; it's going to take out the political heart of the entire realm. It's the gunpowder equivalent of the first great strike of the nuclear weapon on Hiroshima.
Elizabethan Catholics
WW: What would it be like to live as a recusant in late Elizabethan England?
RH: The most common modern analogy for being an Elizabethan Catholic is being a Communist in 1950s America, but being a Communist in 1950s America was a holiday camp compared with being a Catholic recusant under Elizabeth.
Just like in the modern example, you couldn't actually get a job, you were cast out of society, you were suspected of being the local fifth column for a menacing foreign power that stood for everything that your country didn't.
But being an Elizabethan Catholic is actually much worse. You are in danger of having your property searched by armed men without warning at any hour of the day or night. You are fined regularly for the simple act of not turning up to your local parish church. So that's coshing your income at regular intervals.
And, above all, if you actually do what a Catholic is supposed to do, which is to hear the Word of God according to your Church, you need a priest. If you harbour a priest, you're in serious trouble, because this is technically treading on treason, and treason means going against the whole government of the land, to an extent that you risk your life.
WW: Why this fear of Catholicism?
RH: Protestants hated Catholics, because Catholics were the horrible, rotting skeleton in their family cupboard, where everybody had been about two generations before. That's when they were all being conned by the Devil who had perverted the Christian Church into Catholicism to remove everybody's chance of getting to Heaven and condemn everybody to Hell.
So having seen the light, having cottoned on to the real Word of God and got reformed, Protestants saw the Catholics as, collectively, the Devil's hit person – they were the storm troopers of Satan. They were the people who were left in the realm to ensure that the Devil had a real chance of winning back England to eternal fire.
Furthermore, in more straightforward terms, they were the agents of the pope and the pope was linked with the powers of France and Spain, particularly Spain, the strongest, most menacing power in western Europe. So what you're seeing is a Satanic superpower and an evil empire on your doorstep, and the Catholics lodging like a virus inside your body, waiting to kill you off.
Catholics are by definition the people who give loyalty to the pope. And the pope claims the power to depose kings and princes and queens who don't toe his line.
Now if you're an English Protestant around 1560, what you do is look in all directions. To your west is Ireland, stuffed with Catholics; to the north is Scotland, just ceasing to be Catholic, with the Highlands full of menacing Catholics armed to the teeth. Look across to the east and the south and you have the French and the Spanish, who are the super-Catholics, with all the power of a fully armed state system behind them.
So you are cornered, you're surrounded, and you have English Catholics still all among you, everywhere, just waiting for the button to be pushed, to implode your country from the inside, as their adherents crowd in from every point of the compass.
James VI and I
WW: What was James like?
RH: James is really a very intelligent man with a bad PR image. He's donnish – he'd have been a really good professor of theology or law at Edinburgh University in the present day. He's really bright, he writes well, he speaks well, he's got a good brain. He's actually one of the very few English monarchs who can turn out a passable poem and a passable work of history, classics, theology as well. So this is a talented man.
On the other hand, he's informal in his appearance; he has no real idea of dignity. He's ungainly in his walk. He's shy. He doesn't like crowds, he doesn't like big public performances. And he's impetuous, he loves to bait.
And if you put this package together, he's really unlike what a modern monarch is supposed to be, which is this gorgeous-looking stuffed shirt who can say all the right things briefly on ceremonial occasions and not let his tongue run away with him.
James did the exact opposite: he talked and he wrote too much. He loved to get in there, he loved manipulating things, getting in politics, and didn't know when to shut up and let the state run itself.
WW: What's the significance of James being a foreigner?
RH: James is going to be the first foreign ruler to be invited into England, just by right of hereditary succession, just because he's got some royal blood in his veins from England. He's already reigning over a foreign country.
Now this is a very tricky position to be in, because the whole identity of England is that it keeps out foreigners, especially it keeps them off the throne. And James is not only a foreigner. He leads the traditional local rival to the English – the Scots – whom we have to thrash every few generations, just to keep our sense of Englishness inviolate.
He's a man coming down to take over a country to which he's going to be a combination of father and husband. Since he's from the inferior British nation, as far as the English are concerned, this is deeply humiliating. So James has, at all costs, to try and look as English as possible. He's got to try and toe the English line himself. He's got to try and be everything to all the English, and promise heaven and earth in order to get possession of the land.
James and the Catholics
WW: One faction among many who were looking to James for redress were the Catholics. Could you describe that?
RH: James is uncomfortably aware that, in a Europe divided between Protestants and Catholic, if he pleases both, he's safe, he wins both sides. But it's a bit like being on a seesaw.
And so what he does is give the Protestant English every possible public reassurance that he's a good, true Protestant monarch. At the same time, he's tipping the wink privately to English Catholics, saying, 'My mum was a Catholic,' and 'I'm a broad-minded kind of guy, theologically, so if you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you. Know what I mean?'
WW: Can you describe the visit of Thomas Percy?
RH: One of the most unfortunate aspects of James's diplomacy before coming to the English throne is the way he receives private visitors and lets them believe what they wish.
The classic example is Thomas Percy who's going to be one of the Gunpowder conspirators. He's connected to the earl of Northumberland, one of the great magnates of the English realm. He trots up to Scotland to check out James and try and get a solid promise from him to give toleration to English Catholics.
Now as far as we can reconstruct what happened, which is through Percy's spectacles, James, being a smart guy, doesn't give any solemn promises at all. What he seems to do is encourage Percy to believe what Percy wishes to believe.
So Percy then trots back from Scotland and informs the English Catholics that James has actually promised what they need, which is an end to persecution. We'll never know what really happened, but the chances are that Percy was deluding himself, aided by a feline manipulator, with Percy as the mouse.
WW: What do you think James really felt about Catholicism?
RH: As far as we can tell from all his private and public pronouncements, James is really quite a tolerant sort of person for his age. He'd like to reunite all the Churches of Christendom, preferably by his own genius, and he doesn't like persecuting for the sake of it.
On the other hand, he does bitterly resent the claim of the pope to be able to depose people like him. He regards himself as being the chap who should run British religion, both Scottish and English, and so what he wants to do is strike a deal with the pope and the Catholics whereby they will admire him, they'll pamper him, they'll flatter him.
That way he's safe with both sides, but he's got to do it without surrendering too much royal power.
James's honeymoon and after
WW: Late 1603 was a honeymoon period. What happened then?
RH: When James comes down from Scotland, it's the classic honeymoon period. He's doing everything that a king initially should: he's hunting everything that runs and knighting everything that crawls. He lathers the British nation with flattery, with honours. He tells the Scots that they've now got their chance to get their hands on the riches of England. He tells the English that Scotland is surrendering to them because their king is coming down and going to root himself in England and rule the whole British Isles.
He pampers everybody and everybody loves him, and as part of this, he relaxes the persecution of Catholics. It's a trial run to see what benefits he can gain. But he actually does what he may have promised, which is to adopt a hands-off policy on the fining of Catholics for not attending church and honour a few of their sympathisers at court. He then sits back and sees what takes place.
WW: But then there's a backlash. Why?
RH: The trouble with James's initial policy towards Catholics is that he doesn't really take the loonies into account.
What happens is that there is a plot by discontented English courtiers, mostly based in Kent, and there is minor plot associated with it, which is called the Bye Plot, in which a few Catholics, idiot enough to be disappointed that James doesn't actually come out more strongly in favour of the Catholic religion, talk about kidnapping him.
Now because they're crack-brained idiots, they're rapidly discovered. In fact, they're denounced by some of their own Catholic co-religionists, and so the Catholics offer up the sacrifice of their hotheads to please James.
But James was genuinely miffed. The fact that any Catholics would conspire against him after he's tried to treat them all well is enough to put him off. And he also senses the deep resentment of the Protestant establishment against any favours shown to Catholics.
So James starts to trim now. He begins to sacrifice some of his favour towards Catholics in order to make sure of his popularity with the Protestant majority.
Cracking down on the Catholics
WW: How significant is that reining back for Catholics? Are they justified in feeling themselves so goaded or so let down?
RH: To judge the Catholic reaction to James in the first couple of years of his reign, you just need to look at the leading Catholics and the cleverest Catholics. So we're talking here about the great Catholic peers and gentry.
We're also talking about the notional boss of the Catholic Church in England, the arch-priest who runs the secular clergy, and the chief of the English Jesuits, Father Garnet.
And what these say about James is, 'This guy's basically all right. We don't really like the way in which he's gone back on what he may have promised. But on the whole, given the political situation, it's understandable. So what we need to do is be as sweet as possible to him and get him back on the proper course of being good to us. What needs to happen now is not to rock any boats. So, cool it, calm it, sweeten it, wait for it.'
And on the whole, they are probably right.
WW: Why did James start reimposing the recusancy fines? What was the hothead Catholic response to that?
RH: From the point of view of a Catholic hothead in 1604-5, the situation is very simple: James is a traitor.
He's somebody who dared to promise them all that they rightfully deserve, who may even have held out a promise of some day coming back to the true religion himself. But what happens? He tries this transparent trick of relaxing the fines, just to see how the Protestants react, and as soon as a few of them start bleating, he starts persecuting Catholics again.
OK, so there's a minor plot by some particularly extreme hotheads, but the Catholics themselves denounce that, they shop that to James. So he should be perfectly OK with them.
But what does he do? He starts persecuting the Catholics all over again, bringing back the old terrible Elizabethan regime, just to curry favour with a heretical Church.
So from that moment on, to a genuine Catholic extremist, James deserves to die – it's as simple as that. There is no hope from this regime. With God rolling back Protestantism everywhere else in Europe, it's time to roll it back properly in England by blasting the lot to pieces.
The Gunpowder plotters
WW: What kind of people were these plotters?
RH: The Gunpowder conspirators themselves were wild and rather silly young men. They weren't normal English Catholics.
They were relatively young – their average age was in the 30s. And most of them had been through conversion experiences. They weren't people who'd been bred as believing Catholics. Either they'd come from Catholic families and hadn't bothered much about it and then suddenly found Jesus, or else they'd actually converted from Protestantism. So they're people in the throes of missionary experiences. They've realised that their souls are on the brink of eternal damnation, and they want to save their country from the same fate.
And on the whole, they're adventurers. They are people whose personalities are fairly unstable, whose finances are in an even worse condition than their personalities. They're ready to take the biggest risk of all, which is losing their limbs, their heads, their fortunes and their cause for the sake of the jackpot, which is winning England back for Catholicism or, at the very least, releasing their Church from persecution.
WW: Can you think of a contemporary equivalent of these conspirators?
RH: The closest modern equivalent for the Gunpowder conspirators are extreme terrorists living in the West and planting bombs, like the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, like the Weathermen in America, like the Angry Brigade in Italy.
These are terrorists who work through explosive acts – literally and metaphorically – which are intended to blast away their enemies, come out of nothing and disrupt the whole fabric of a society they've come to hate.
WW: What was Catesby like?
RH: Catesby is, in many ways, the most interesting of the lot, because he's the brains, if that's the word, behind the whole idea. It's Catesby who puts the plot together. Without him, there would be no conspiracy.
And he is somebody who has come back to Catholicism after a long and not terribly happy holiday from it. He is somebody who's a gambler throughout his life. He is somebody of incredible persuasive charm.
It's clear enough that, whenever anybody's wavering or, to put it another way, starting to see common sense, Catesby is the person who says, 'No, you've got to go on.' And people actually believe him.
So this is a hypnotic character, a swashbuckler of real charm, real emotive power.
WW: And what about Percy?
RH: Thomas Percy is the dreamer of the lot. He is the most richly connected – second cousin five times removed of the earl of Northumberland, which in those days is quite something. He actually hobnobs with the rich and famous. He's got the entrée to the limits of the court circle.
Percy is the person who can see Catholicism back on top most clearly, because he's the closest of all the conspirators to being there himself.
WW: And Guy Fawkes?
RH: Guy Fawkes is the fall guy. It's no accident that he happens to be the chap who's on the spot and gets arrested first.
He's a soldier of conscience and a soldier of fortune. He's the one who goes abroad to fight in the Netherlands for the crown of Spain, the contemporary enemies of the English and the greatest Catholic power in Europe. He's the chap who's prepared to truck down to Spain himself, to try and talk about an invasion of England.
So of all these wild young men, Guy is the wildest. He's a Yorkshire man, strangely enough – you couldn't find anybody less blunt and straightforward and down to earth than Guy Fawkes.
His actual name is Guido -he never called himself Guy. And the fact that he adopts a foreign name indicates that he's somebody who crosses frontiers, a man without a nation any more, a man who has given up his body and soul to a cause.
WW: What about Francis Tresham?
RH: Francis Tresham is the weakest link in the whole chain of conspiracy. He's the one who should never have been taken on board.
But you can see why they go for him. He's fanatical, he's rich, he's silly, he's a great gambler, he's in appalling financial trouble, he's the sort of man they're looking for who will take the job on.
On the other hand, he's notoriously unreliable, he's notoriously unstable, he's a blabbermouth. It is probably through Tresham that the leak comes that scuppers the whole plot. We'll never be sure, but of all the conspirators, he is the one who represents the greatest danger to the rest.
The plot and the age
WW: What sort of age was this that could have bred that kind of 'let's blow the whole thing up' response in these men?
RH: Although it's important to stress that the Gunpowder Plot was a crazy venture, it was part of an age in which royal assassination was one of the main tools of politics. There was a whole series of plots to kill Elizabeth. The great leader of the Dutch rebels, the Prince of Orange, had been successfully assassinated, and just a few years after the failure of the Gunpowder conspiracy, Henry IV of France was knifed to death by a Catholic fanatic.
And so this is, for the age, quite a common would-be weapon, which occasionally pays great political dividends and changes the course of history.
WW: You've described this as an age of political nastiness ...
RH: In many ways, the late 16th/early 17th century is an age of peculiarly nasty politics, because it combines all the worst features of religious hatreds and family nastiness.
You have these competing dynasties who loathe each other in the way that families often do and are anxious to take each other out in order to win family fortunes. It's the classic way in which murders are arranged in paperback thrillers.
And on the other hand, you also have the steely edge of religious competition. This means that, if you take out your second cousin on another throne, you're not just doing your country some good and doing your family inheritance some good, you're helping yourself get to Heaven.
The flaws in the plot
WW: Was this a well-planned plot? Was this a realistic plot?
RH: There's no doubt to my mind that the Gunpowder conspiracy was crack- brained from start to finish.
It had two great weaknesses. The obvious one is that the only way you can take over the country is to get enough Catholics ready to be in the right places at the right time when the bomb goes off.
On the other hand, if you do that, the risk of the plot leaking among a Catholic community that is opposed to just this kind of device is enormous. And of course, that's exactly what happened.
But they were also lousy munitions experts. Because the state opening of Parliament was postponed, the gunpowder was kept sitting in that cellar from July right up to the beginning of November. And when the royal officials took charge of it after the arrest of Guy Fawkes, they found it was 'decayed', which is the technical term for the powder decomposing, separating into its chemical parts. So had the plot never been uncovered, had it all gone according to plan, all that would have happened when Guy stuck his torch into the powder tray would have been a damp splutter and nothing at all.
WW: Go back to June 1604. One of the things that seems most remarkable at that stage is that they haven't really thought about the second half of the plot – the Midlands side of things. And they don't have a place in Westminster, they don't yet have a lease on a cellar, nor do they know that they're going to get one. What do they think at that stage?
RH: To understand quite how off the planet the Gunpowder conspirators are most of the time, you have to look at their situation halfway through the planning stage of the conspiracy.
It's still only a few months from the time when everything's supposed to go up. They don't actually have a lease on a cellar near Parliament. They don't actually have a network of conspirators in the Midlands. In fact, neither of the two essential pivotal poles of the plot are in place.
But they still go forward, because these are people who really believe that the entire Holy Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Ghost – actually wants them to do this crazy thing. Therefore nothing is crazy if God wants it – God will organise it for you. That's what happens if you believe in providence.
The conspirators in London
WW: Tell me about the circumstance by which Percy got some lodgings.
RH: In retrospect, it's not amazing that Thomas Percy manages to obtain a private rent on a cellar right underneath Parliament. Because, in those days, Westminster is a sprawling, booming suburb of London. It's a rookery of private tenements.
Because Percy is dimly connected to the aristocracy, to the court, he is in a privileged position to get a sublet on a building that is normally let to royal officials, those who hold court positions. Since the court wages are appalling, the only way you actually make serious money is through bribes and through sublets. So because of the wish of one of the officials of the royal household to make some pin money on the side, Percy is able to obtain a vital two rooms in just the right position at the right time.
WW: What was Westminster like at this time?
RH: Westminster was basically a rabbit warren, inhabited by rabbits wearing silk and ermine and velvet. It is a boom suburb; it's growing very, very fast. As the number of court offices expands tremendously under James in his desire to please everybody all the time, so the demand for lodgings increases.
The demand is greater still with Parliament meeting fairly frequently at this time, which means that people have to find rooms within easy walking distance of the palace. And so space is at a premium. It's a grubby, messy, untidy, over-moneyed, precious society in which contacts are absolutely everything. If you know the right person, you get a job, get a lodging, get a salary. If you don't know the right person, you don't get within spitting distance of it.
WW: Guy Fawkes is set up as the London part of this operation. Why Guy Fawkes?
RH: Guy Fawkes has liabilities and he has assets, and that's why he's used in London where the two of them are in the best balance.
He's a liability because he's a nobody in the Catholic network of the provinces. He isn't part of the network of priest holes and luncheon picnics and hunting parties where conspiracies are arranged.
On the other hand, he does know about munitions, he's a soldier, he's part of an international network of Catholic conspiracy and, above all, he's an unknown. He's a man without a name who can move silently across frontiers. And in that great thriving metropolis, a nameless man with a mission is the best person to have on base.
WW: Over the course of these months, they gather together gunpowder. Where do they get gunpowder from?
RH: Gunpowder is in a strange position round about 1603-4. On the one hand, it's a monopoly: you have to have a special licence to make it and you're only allowed to sell to the government or to merchant shipping, which needs it to protect itself from pirates at this time.
On the other hand, England was making far more gunpowder – at the end of a war with Spain – than it actually needs. So the government licences the retailers to sell off the surplus. Officially, they can only sell it to shipping; unofficially they offload it wherever they can get the best price. So there is a thriving, officially connived-at black market in gunpowder at just the wrong time for the government.
WW: The gunpowder comes from the east, and Catesby has lodgings in Lambeth, and the cellar is obviously north of the river. What was the river like in those days?
RH: The Thames is the great artery of London, through which all the traffic throbs. It's also – given the fact that you're dealing with crowded stinking streets, ankle high in dung and full of footpads – the safest and fastest way of getting anywhere. It's like taking a helicopter today.
You go down to the nearest quayside on the Thames, you hire one of the passing wherrymen, which are like taxis, and then you get rowed up or down river far faster than you can travel on land. This is why it's the way everything moves – political refugees, clandestine consignments of gunpowder and just ordinary would-be pedestrians going about their daily business.
The plot is delayed
WW: From the time of the meeting at the Duck and Drake to the November, there are two delays of Parliament. The first is just before Christmas – they delay it till October – and just before that they delay it till November. Could you explain why Parliaments were delayed?
RH: One of the dodgiest things about blowing up a Parliament is working out when the Parliament is going to be there, because parliamentary sessions are delicate things. They impose an incredible strain on the government. And they also impose a strain on all the people who are hauled in from the provinces to sit in the Commons or the Lords.
London is notoriously unhealthy, so you can't keep people there for too long. The summer months are especially dodgy. They're the best time for travelling; the roads are at their best. On the other hand, they're the best time for disease, so you chance wiping out your political nation with an epidemic.
And this is almost exactly what happens. There are two delays in 1604/5. Parliament is summoned for the winter, but then the government thinks it'll be better prepared for an autumn session – they want to put it off in order to perfect certain things over the summer. So there's this huge delay till October.
And then there's an even more important delay, it's only a month, but it could affect history. And that's because bubonic plague is in London and plague is the most dreaded contagious disease of the day. So they put off meeting until the winter months when, as we now know, the fleas are going to bed and so plague dies down.
Now, the interesting thing is that, had Parliament met in early October, there is a chance that both the gunpowder would still have been in prime condition and the plot wouldn't have leaked as far as it had. There is also a real chance that had there not been plague in London that year, had the wrong sort of flea not been abroad in the streets of the capital, the Gunpowder conspiracy would actually have worked.
WW: From Catesby's point of view, what's the significance of the delay, especially the first delay?
RH: The postponement of Parliament from winter to autumn is critical to Catesby. For a start, it gives him a chance to broaden out the conspiracy, to arrange the details of a Midland rebellion, after the king and the political nation are removed. Until now, in a curious way, although it's lunatic, the plot is actually viable. It's the big bang theory of destruction, in which you take out your enemy and then work out what happens next. A minimal number of people are involved.
Catesby now goes on to phase two, and in doing so, he actually makes the plot more likely to succeed – there is actually a follow-up plan. On the other hand, it's much more likely to fail, because more and more people know about it. It's like spinning a spider's web, in which you're going to be catching potentially really quite dangerous animals as well as flies.
Catholic attitudes towards the plot
WW: Catesby made a confession to his priest. Tell us about the Jesuits at this stage, how much they knew and what they thought.
RH: If there are tragic victims in this whole affair, it's the Jesuits involved, particularly because they did their utmost to stop the plot happening.
Halfway through 1605, Catesby makes a confession to his own confessor who then goes for a walk in a garden with Father Garnet, his fellow Jesuit, who is boss of the order in England. The confessor lets slip the fact that there is a conspiracy afoot to blow up the government. Father Garnet immediately realises that this is an insane idea.
The immediate problem is that this information has been given in confession, and as any practising Catholic knows, a priest cannot tell what occurs in a confessional. You have to keep the seal on the confessional.
So what, as far as we can tell, Garnet does is slips a message back through the priest, indicating to Catesby that this idea is foolish, and although it won't be made public, it would be a very good idea if he calls it off. Garnet gets back a mixed message by the same indirect route that Catesby is, in fact, having second thoughts.
It's now August, and the Jesuits concerned are able to go off on a pilgrimage to a holy well in Wales in a real holiday atmosphere, secure in the knowledge that they've done their duty to their Church and to the souls of those people in their care by preventing the conspiracy.
We'll never know why Catesby couldn't take the hint from the person who was his religious superior. It may be that he didn't recognise the hint. It could be that he decided, in his conscience, that he had a higher duty to God than to the Jesuits.
WW: What would other Catholics have thought of such a plot?
RH: There is no doubt whatsoever that, when the Gunpowder conspiracy was revealed, the vast majority of the English Catholic community were absolutely horrified. It was the very thing they didn't believe in. In fact, it had become almost a tenet of English Catholicism that you were politically loyal to your monarch, while being spiritually loyal to the pope.
And this was quite sincere because the sort of mind-set that made a Catholic – dogged conservatism, a high sense of honour – is the sort that made a loyal subject to the monarchy.
And had the Gunpowder conspiracy actually gone off, had the political nation been blown up, it's almost certain that the result would have been a catastrophe for English Catholics. Almost none of them knew about the plot – they'd have been caught unawares. There would have been this hysterical rumour coming through from London of Catholics having murdered the government and risen in the Midlands. Almost certainly the Protestants would have turned on local Catholics and butchered them. There would have been the English equivalent of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, when the French Catholics turned on the Protestants.
As it is, they are absolutely shocked by what happens, and disown the plot, but by then, it's too late for most of them.
The Monteagle letter
WW: What happened on the night when Monteagle's servant handed him the letter? What was the official version?
RH: The official version of the discovery of the plot is as follows. We have a second-rate, personally disreputable Catholic peer, Monteagle, sitting down to dinner. His servant Thomas Ward turns up and hands him a letter, informing 'my lord' that a mysterious gentleman – booted, spurred and masked – has arrived, dumped this letter in the man's hand and told him to take it to the boss.
Monteagle opens the letter. It tells him that he's not to attend the opening of Parliament because a sudden and dramatic and unspecified blow is to be dealt against the enemies of his religion.
WW: Tell me more about Monteagle. Who was he?
RH: Monteagle is not a nice man and he is not much liked. He is a Catholic peer, and the Catholics half-heartedly accept him as one of their own. But he is unlike most Catholics, who are temperamentally sagacious, doggedly loyal, steady – with the exception of the conspirators, of course!
He is officially what we call a 'church papist', which means that he's pretending to be a Protestant. This, although it's not the high standard of English Catholicism, is half OK as long as you use your influence to help your co- religionists. Nobody at the time seems to think that Monteagle is actually doing it for that reason. It seems fairly transparent that he is a selfish opportunist who is now playing the Protestant card in public to try and make himself a court career, because being a good Catholic has temporarily failed him. He is indiscreet, he's unreliable, he's selfish, he's the person not to trust if you're going to go into a conspiracy.
WW: So he receives this letter – what does he do with it?
RH: Act Two of the official version has Monteagle arriving late at night and in great confusion and hurry to show this letter to the obvious person to whom it should not to be shown – the king's most trusted, most savagely anti-Catholic and most unscrupulous minister, Cecil, who is his secretary of state and his chief adviser, who is from a family with a hereditary aversion to the faith of Rome.
Monteagle, who apparently has no idea what the letter means, presses it into Cecil's hands. Although Cecil is the most intelligent man in the government, he professes to be completely bamboozled as well. The two men call the letter 'dark' and 'doubtful', according to the official story, and they rack their brains over it for ages. Eventually, having failed totally to work out what it is about, they move on to Act Three – showing it to the king.
WW: Taking it purely at face value the fact that someone did send this letter to Monteagle that night in Hoxton, what kind of person would have written the letter? Someone on the margins of the plan who is concerned for Monteagle?
RH: The problem for a historian looking at the Monteagle letter is that, at face value, it's absolutely absurd. If somebody wants to warn Monteagle, why go to the trouble of putting pen to paper? A verbal warning from a good friend would have done the job without giving the hard evidence that Monteagle might take to the government, being a person of rather dodgy character.
There are three more plausible explanations for the existence of this letter. One is that it was written by a female member of one of the conspirators' families in order to blow the plot's cover and thereby stop it happening – to rescue families from a really risky venture that might actually result in their destruction as landowners and as dynasties.
Another explanation is that the letter was written by Monteagle himself to provide hard documentary evidence of something he'd only been told verbally, in order to make his story more believable to the government.
A final explanation for the Monteagle letter – and by far the nastiest, the most weaselly and cynical – is that it was actually written by Robert Cecil himself, or one of his secretaries, to provide him, in collusion with Monteagle, with the sort of evidence he needed to take to the king and electrify the government into action.
In other words, Cecil had been tipped off verbally about a plot and wanted something more solid in order to focus government opinion and to provide something really dramatic to seize the public imagination, when a plot about which they'd already heard on the grapevine had been publicly unmasked. Historians, dramatists and pulp novelists just love the Monteagle letter because it will forever leave us with a puzzle. We'll never be able to say with any certainty who produced it, and therefore the historian's mind naturally runs wild about possibilities.
Robert Cecil
WW: What kind of man was Cecil?
RH: Robert Cecil was the runt of an aristocratic litter. He was the second son of the chief minister of Queen Elizabeth, who was himself a Welshman on the make, whose family had come up from Wales to cash in on the Tudors and did so wonderfully.
Robert is the brains of the family, imprisoned in a deformed body. He's tiny. James calls him his 'little beagle' after the smallest sort of hunting dog. He is certainly a bit deformed – he's called a hunchback, but mostly by his enemies. He's certainly a bit bent, he's a bit wizened, one shoulder seems a bit lower than the other. He's actually a nice Richard III.
He is bitterly aware of his physical frailty. He hates the jokes being made about him, even when made by Queen Elizabeth or King James. He's got a real ambition to make his name, get power, get money, make up for being sold short on the physical end.
And the fact that he's a younger son, with no automatic rights to the family estates and title, makes it even more imperative. He's got to use his undoubted brains to carry the family name forward and get an earldom of his own, and that's just what he does.
WW: Was Cecil really a 'spymaster'?
RH: The turn of the 16th and 17th century is a great age of intelligence in the modern sense – a desire to acquire hard information about what rival governments and rival politicians are up to.
All royal ministers worth the name and, most of all, secretaries of state have a paid network of spies. What you're seeing in Robert Cecil is the equivalent of Jack Straw and [John LeCarré's] George Smiley rolled into one – MI5, the Home Office and the Foreign Office under the same roof and operating through the same network of paid informers, secretaries and clerks.
And Cecil's nature, which is secretive, manipulative and selfish, is absolutely ideal for this sort of task. He's one of the fattest spiders spinning away on one of the biggest webs in Europe at the very beginning of the Jacobean period.
WW: Now we have a letter we don't know the provenance of. We have a man who dislikes Catholics and who knows a lot. How do we put all those ingredients together in relation to Cecil and the letter?
RH: The reason why theories surround this conspiracy is that the government minister who claims to have discovered the plot is himself an arch-conspirator.
He is a spymaster, he is a manipulator, he's somebody who's cunning and devious and he's used to orchestrating and rigging assemblies, monarchs and hirelings alike. He comes from a family that is not only determined to destroy Catholicism as the Anti-Christ, but also has a history of rigging plots. Mary Queen of Scots was framed by a combination of politicians, including Cecil's own father. A plot was set up to destroy her.
And so with this family background, it is natural for people to suspect that, to some extent, Cecil rigged the Gunpowder conspiracy himself. As soon as the plot was uncovered, Catholics in particular began to suspect – and to articulate that suspicion – that Cecil himself had, if not actually put the whole plot together, encouraged it, manipulated it, brought it to fruition.
WW: So now we have Monteagle and Cecil sitting in the same room together with the letter in Cecil's hands. What do you think Cecil already knew?
RH: It's quite impossible for anybody to say with confidence how much Cecil already knew once he had the Monteagle letter in his hands.
If we're going to go by past family history, what might have happened is that Cecil was tipped off verbally about the plot some time in October or even earlier. He then set to work to ripen it, to let it run right up to the last minute, to make its revelation as advantageous as possible for himself (as the guy who tips off the king), as advantageous as possible to the king (as the person who can claim the credit) and as advantageous as possible for the entire government so that, having come so close to destruction, it now has the best target against which to rally public opinion at a time when the honeymoon was starting to wear off between James and his subjects.
James and the letter
WW: You said earlier that Act Three in the official version was when the king became involved. What happened?
RH: According to the official version, Cecil takes the Monteagle letter to the king who is the first person – immediately, brilliantly, spontaneously – to perceive the truth of the matter and suggest it might be a good idea if people started searching the cellars beneath the Houses of Parliament and in the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster. In this way, the conspiracy is revealed by the only person equipped by God to do so, which is the brainy monarch himself. This is wildly implausible, given how sharp Cecil himself is. But in favour of James having some role in it, you have to say that he's a clever man. He is perceptive, quick-witted and also a very good survivor.
Of the six rulers of Scotland before James, only one had not died violently, and he died of nervous exhaustion. James's mother had her head hacked off in an English gaol, his father was strangled after an attempt to blow him up, and James himself had survived two attempts on his life, one allegedly by trapping the assassin's head under his arm and screaming for help for all he was worth.
And of the four men who governed Scotland when James was a child – remember he was one year old when he became king – two were murdered, one was executed and one was driven abroad in order to save his life.
James grew up in a very hard school. He is used to the idea of attempts on royal lives. He is ready for this one.
WW: We get the official version from the King's Book. What is this and can we trust it?
RH: The reason why we have an official version of how the Monteagle letter arrived and the events then unfolded is because, when the whole thing was over, when the government had all the sources of information at its disposal and could package them neatly, it issued the equivalent of a press release and a peak-hour news bulletin rolled into one: the King's Book. This is the official government pamphlet that spells out – in simple, very dramatic, energetic prose – the government's idea of how the plot came to be and establishes the authoritative, enduring English Protestant version of the conspiracy.
Tresham is accused
WW: The news got back to Catesby via Thomas Ward, Monteagle's servant, and the first person he accuses is Tresham ...
RH: Once the news gets back that the plot is leaking, the person whom Catesby and his most intimate conspirators immediately suspect is Tresham, which speaks volumes, both for Tresham's own unreliable nature and for the lack of caution in bringing him into the conspiracy in the first place. He's their immediate suspect and therefore he should be ours.
In view of all this, it's incredibly significant that Tresham denies writing the Monteagle letter twice over.
He takes an oath in front of Catesby and the others to establish he did not write it. Furthermore – and this is even more important – when he dies before coming to trial, he makes a deathbed confession in which again he denies being responsible for writing any letter to Monteagle. Had Tresham wanted to save his life, his family fortune, his honour among Catholics after the plot is bungled, it would have been in his interest to claim to be the chap who was ultimately responsible for saving the entire Protestant political nation. The fact that he doesn't under those circumstances is pretty well certain proof that, when it comes to writing that letter, Tresham is not our man.
The trouble is, we are dealing with people to whom words are all important. Tresham says he didn't write the letter. What he doesn't say is that he didn't warn Monteagle. And it just could be that Tresham is the man who whispers verbally, or through a friend, the warning to Monteagle in the first place. This then gets converted into the letter to produce documentary evidence for the government.
WW: Catesby knows that Cecil has got this document, regardless of where it came from. Why doesn't he call off the plot?
RH: One of the great mysteries of the whole affair is why, having discovered that the plot has been disclosed, knowing that the government is on to them, Catesby doesn't do the obvious thing and skedaddle. It's fairly blatant now that the conspiracy is going to fail and they're going to pay the maximum penalty. We'll never know why Catesby doesn't get everybody out of England while they still had a few days' grace.
One can only surmise that the mind of a fanatic just doesn't operate in common- sensical and rational ways.
Though having gone this far, on the verge of becoming a penniless exile for the rest of his life, perhaps Catesby hopes that the normal bungling ways of humanity will enable Guy to get through with a torch at the right moment and the whole lot will go sky high. There's always a chance that people won't see a very large quantity of gunpowder in the right place at the right time or that Guy will simply slip behind a pillar and not be noticed and the thing will actually happen.
The discovery of the plot
WW: What happened during the first search of the cellar?
RH: According to the generally unbelievable world of government propaganda, the cellar is inspected by a team led by the earl of Suffolk, who is the main royal household officer, and Monteagle. They notice a shadowy shape of a man lurking around and a quantity of firewood that was absurdly large for the needs of the lodging next door.
Both these things are deeply suspicious and would obviously draw the attention of a halfwit, but according to the official version, no further steps are taken. They go back and tell the king, the only person with half a brain cell among them, who says, 'Oh, this is suspicious, isn't it? I think you should go back and have another look.' And they go back to have another look and – blow me down! – somebody spots Guy and he's nabbed.
WW: Fill me in on the drama of that moment.
RH: The beauty of the official version is that it conjures up such a wonderfully theatrical image. No wonder we still have it riveted in our minds – Guy with his beard, his hat, his cloak, his 'dark lantern' (that's a smoke lantern, the flame hardly shows) and the torch ready to ignite the fuse, and the posse of men suddenly stumbling in at the last moment and finding him there. It's just so beautifully vivid.
Of course, that is how he was actually caught. But what we have to go through in order to reach the point where we can believe that none of this was stage managed requires an act of faith considerably greater than believing in the Holy Apostolic Church or any other.
WW: What is the popular reaction in the streets of London to the arrest of Guy Fawkes?
RH: When the news gets out, it's every bit as big a sensation as it deserves to be. It is a terrific story, it is a shock, it is horror. Nothing like this has ever been attempted before.
It brings to the simmering surface of the hot Protestant mind the notion that Catholics are mortal enemies, that they're not to be trusted, that they are the natural foe. To those hotter Protestants who believe the pope really is the Anti- Christ, this is the absolute proof, so it's thrilling.
You have all the joy of a near-escape, of realising you came to the brink of a truly appalling act of destruction. At the same time, every single prejudice you have is now beautifully confirmed, every lurking corner of tolerance or rationality or neighbourliness that might have been there can now be swept away in an absolute tidal wave of hysterical anti-Catholicism.
The flight of the conspirators
WW: What is the reaction among the conspirators as the news filters out?
RH: The conspirators in London, of whom the leaders are Winter and Percy, have a quick confab at this stage and work out what to do. And they do the only thing sensible left to them: they bolt for the provinces.
The other thing they could have done was simply to head for the nearest quayside and get over to the Netherlands. But it's part of the mind-cast of these men that they still try and put Plan B into action, when Plan A has demonstrably failed. The political nation is totally intact. There's still the hope that, if they start a rising in the Midlands, it might just sweep up enough Catholic fanatics to raise a rebellion that will actually take out the heart of the nation geographically, if not politically.
WW: So how does Catesby find out?
RH: One of the most dramatic moments in the entire story is when Catesby – riding for the Midlands in the expectation that the bomb's gone off behind him – is overtaken by Rookwood, another of the conspirators, who breaks the truly appalling news that Guy has been arrested and the plot is now out in the open.
One will never know quite how Catesby reacted. He had to have been inhuman not to have felt a flicker of doubt about the wisdom of what was now happening. After all, he's ahead of the chase. There is still a real chance of heading westwards and getting out of England, sweeping up his friends with him.
Whether or not he ever thought that, by the time that the others catch up with him, Catesby has reverted to type. And he actually succeeds – with his incredible, unbelievable powers of persuasion – in putting them into a full-scale rebellion. In other words, he treats the situation as though the gunpowder has actually exploded and carries on from there, trying to win through at the very end – perhaps in the belief that, if you do something that's really, really crazy enough, it just might work because nobody is expecting it.
The plotters' last stand
WW: So they start raising some of the other Catholic fans, but with little success ...
RH: What happens next is absolutely tragic. The gaggle of conspirators ride round and round their Catholic mates in the Midlands and try desperately to get a rebellion going, but in place after place, they find themselves politely invited to carry on their way. The Catholics concerned recognise madness when they see it.
Inevitably the conspirators become the pursued. The word gets out to the local posse, and the plotters find themselves a hunted group of men looking for a refuge, a lair, instead of being the predators seeking to start a rebellion to take out the heart of the nation.
By the time the conspirators reach what's going to be their last stand, which is Holbeach House in Staffordshire, everything's gone wrong. They've been abandoned by their co-religionists. Even the weather's rotten: they've been soaked through on their ride, so their belongings are completely saturated.
They're on the verge of despair, they're on the verge of catching colds. About the only thing remaining for them now is to make an epic last stand and find martyrdom. After all, if you are a religious fanatic, then to be a religious martyr is a form of victory. Holbeach is going to be, on the surface, the rather unlikely setting for one of the great acts of Catholic martyrdom in British history.
WW: They find that their powder is wet ...
RH: If ever there is a sign that the Gunpowder conspirators are chemically challenged, it is what happens when they reach Holbeach.
They are determined now to make a last stand. They've got to have gunpowder to charge their guns, and of course, it has become soaked during their ride because of the heavy rain. What do they do?
Anybody there with even the slightest training in munitions would know that you have to dry out gunpowder slowly and carefully, even if time's pressing. The price is so high if you make a mistake, you need to take care.
Nobody there even seems to think of this. With the inanity of first-year students, they actually spread the lot out to dry in front of an open fire, which is literally suicide.
WW: They tried to use powder to kill the king. That failed. They now have their own powder blow up in their faces. There's something providential in that, something very ironic ...
RH: The inevitable explosion takes place. And in a tragicomic aspect of the Gunpowder Plot, nobody actually dies, but they all look like Black and White Minstrels, because gunpowder burns into your cheeks. Some of them are very badly singed.
One poor guy, John Grant, is actually blinded by it when it goes straight into his eyes, and the rest are charred and they're sickly, but nobody's actually killed. And having been so richly humiliated, they have to turn round, salvage the remaining gunpowder and prepare to fight to the death.
The fact that the conspiracy that had set out to blow up the political nation had almost ended by blowing itself up demonstrates the sheer madness and bungling mixed with genuine heroism that was so strong in the make-up of the Gunpowder conspirators. Anybody with a cynical view of providence would say that there is a deep irony in the closing stages of their tragedy.
The final shootout is as epic as any western. It is Young Guns all over again. It is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as the posse aim their guns from the courtyard, the conspirators burst out, all guns blazing, helpfully standing at doorways and making perfect targets.
The Wright brothers are shot down, mortally wounded. Winter gets a broken arm from a musket ball and reels back inside. Catesby turns to Thomas Percy and says, 'Right, this is it, Tom. Let's go out together.' They leap out into the courtyard, and in an uncommonly good piece of shooting for the time, muskets being so inaccurate, the same musket ball actually takes them both out. They fall back inside. Catesby, never abandoned by his sense of theatre, manages to crawl to an icon of the Virgin Mary and is found clasping it in his arms, making the ultimate Catholic icon of a dying martyr.
To the very end, Catesby had enough brains to know how to die. Not for him the humiliation, the degrading public ceremony of execution. He was going to die a martyr, making the finest possible end scene.
WW: It's only 7 November, but news of the plot has got to the Midlands incredibly fast so that the militia could be raised. This is one of those things that leads people to be suspicious of the stage management of the event in the latter stages ...
RH: Some people are very suspicious of the way in which the posse gets raised in the West Midlands only 48 hours after the discovery of the conspiracy. For some, this has reinforced the idea that the government stage-managed everything, that it got its men in the right place at the right time.
This is possible, but it isn't necessary. You could actually get a message up the equivalent of the A1 from London to Edinburgh in a couple of days.
And in a situation like this, of the greatest possible political emergency, the official grapevine – with fresh post horses at regular intervals – could have raised that posse through normal channels. There isn't any need to imagine that Cecil would have gone to the quite dangerous lengths of setting up a body of people before claiming that the whole thing was a last-minute discovery.
The government spin
WW: How do James and Cecil spin the foiling of the plot?
RH: There are two spins that Cecil and James need to put on the Gunpowder conspiracy to make it perfect for their purposes.
The first and most obvious is to load up the impression of a conspiracy that almost worked, foiled by a chance discovery, acted upon by amazing royal intelligence using as its unwitting agent the chap who is the most ambitious and reliable adviser of the king. So gold stars all round for the government team.
The other spin the government needs to put on it is to involve the Catholic leadership, and especially those parts of the leadership that it hates most because they are the most intelligent and efficient wing of the Catholic Church: the Jesuits.
What the government has got to do is to spin this conspiracy, to implicate the leaders of the Jesuits in England to enable them to be condemned, humiliated and executed with the actual conspirators.
WW: We have quite contradictory opinions as to whether they really did come down hard on the Jesuits or not ...
RH: James's manipulation of the Catholic problem after the plot is discovered is very clever indeed. He encourages really vicious new laws to be passed against Catholics, and he produces show trials, not just for the conspirators, but for the superior of the Jesuits in England. So high-profile, well-respected Catholic clergy have been taken out.
On the other hand, he ensures that there isn't any butchery of regular Catholics, or even of regular Catholic priests. As a result, for the rest of his reign, although the laws are even more severe than those in Elizabeth's reign, the actual damage to Catholics is less. So he's giving Catholics a chance to gain something by being law-abiding subjects.
He's turning the plot into a two-edged weapon – on the one hand, to spur Protestants into a reinforced loyalty to his government and make Parliament more manageable, and on the other hand, to produce a more loyal and docile and tractable body of Catholics than ever before. On the whole, that's exactly what happens. This is a government that is clever and ruthless enough to use the plot to its absolute best advantage.
WW: There's a story afterwards that the conspirators dug a mine – the devilish idea of a man underground with powder. Is that true?
RH: One of the images that the government make great play of after the plot is uncovered is that the conspirators planned to dig a mine underneath the Houses of Parliament, actually to tunnel into the earth and then blow it up.
This seems highly unlikely. There's no trace of it in anything that we know of the conspirators' plans, and it would have been almost ridiculously expensive in time and labour and unlikely to work.
Compared with that, the project that was actually realised – of renting a cellar and stashing the gunpowder there – is viable, so it looks as if the government is producing this hideous image of these demons, these devils tunnelling away within the earth and preparing to blow up the very earth itself and take the best and brightest in the realm with it. It's a marvellous image, but in terms of politics and, indeed, of war, it just doesn't wash.
James and Fawkes
WW: One very dramatic moment is James's interview with Guy Fawkes. What was going on in James's mind?
RH: The most dramatic single interview – the sort of thing that Hollywood would have contrived if it hadn't happened in history – is the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation of Guy Fawkes, the conspirator we all know about, and the king himself. And this happened halfway through the set of examinations, towards the end of those of Guy Fawkes, and this is totally in character for James.
Whenever a really hot political prisoner comes up, James likes satisfying his own intellectual curiosity and also upping the drama of the moment by interrogating in person. It shows him to be at the cutting edge of government activity. It gives him a chance to try out his really quite considerable forensic skills of debate.
The dress rehearsal for the interview of Guy Fawkes had occurred about one and a half decades before. James had uncovered an apparent set of witches in Edinburgh who had been conspiring to murder him by magic, and he had interviewed them in person. So James is used to interrogating state criminals and he makes huge capital out of it.
WW: At the end of that interview, he authorises the use of torture ...
RH: To modern eyes and ears, the most sinister aspect of James's personal interview with Guy Fawkes is at the end, when he tosses Guy Fawkes over to acute physical suffering. He gives regulations for him to be tortured on a kind of increasing scale, starting with the 'gentler' tortures, in order to get the most out of him.
Now English law is more humane than most European law, because officially you cannot be tortured to produce a confession. Under strict English law, somebody can only be tortured in political cases where the person's guilt is already established. In other words, once you've been tried and found guilty, you can be put on the rack or strung up by your arms to get further details from you to convict your associates.
In the case of Guy, his guilt is so absolutely self-evident – he's made no attempt to deny it – that he's now prime game for torture and that's exactly what happens. The phrase, the 'gentler' tortures, is always repeated by people, but we should never forget that James says: 'And after you've tried those, you go on to the less gentle tortures.' Famously, the fact that Guy can hardly scrawl his name by the time they've finished with him indicates quite how severely he was strung up or racked.
If the plot had succeeded
WW: If the plot had succeeded, what do you think would have happened next?
RH: Had Guy Fawkes actually been able to light that powder at the right moment, then almost certainly what would have followed would have been a bloodbath for English Catholics.
The rising in the Midlands would have happened, but would have caught the Catholic community and the Protestants equally unprepared. The Protestants would still have been very numerous, very well armed. They would have converged from all around on the Catholic rebels. And what happened at Holbeach would have happened anyway, I think. But with no central government to alert people as to what exactly had taken place, general suspicion would have fallen upon the entire Catholic community. Local Protestants would have slaughtered local Catholics in a frenzy of hatred and terror and desire for revenge, exactly equivalent to the famous massacre of Protestants in France on St Bartholomew's Day in the previous generation. And English Catholicism would have been virtually annihilated.
There is about a 1% chance that Protestants would have been so dazed and demoralised that Catesby's lot could actually have seized Princess Elizabeth and made her their stooge, and then there would have been a tolerance of Catholics and a reconversion of the nation to Catholicism later. But I wouldn't put that as more than a 1 in 100 chance.
The impact of the conspiracy
WW: What was the impact on James's popularity?
RH: The short-term impact for the government is enormous. It temporarily restores the union between James and the hearts and minds of his English subjects. The government actually gets a tame Parliament for a session or two, and the souring of the honeymoon atmosphere is eliminated for a time.
The trouble was that James himself was quite capable of alienating English public opinion in the long term because of his zeal for union with Scotland, because of his extravagant finances, because of his curious taste in beautiful young men with tapering legs – all very unpopular things.
So despite the Gunpowder Plot, what would have been the natural course of events ran their own particular way, and James ended up a soured, sickly, unpopular monarch, for all his gifts and for all his good beginning.
The only real long-term result was to make life worse for English Catholics.
WW: What was the impact for Protestantism in England?
RH: The impact of the Gunpowder conspiracy on English Protestantism is colossal and enduring.
It's no accident that it's Guy Fawkes on top of bonfires on 5 November. English Protestantism lacked festivals. One of the great selling points of the medieval church was the sheer number of holy days and the vividness and elaboration of religious ceremonial. Protestantism got rid of that, so what Protestants needed was something visually spectacular and emotionally exhilarating.
And the Gunpowder Plot actually gave them their first, really great national festivity, and that's why it has endured. It became part of popular culture and gave Protestants an opportunity, at the opening of winter, to let off steam in every possible way and to feel patriotic and holy while they were doing it.
